Deciding on vacation destination and mapping the destination

Me and my gf finally decided where to go this summer, first the country and the final destination. We where to Parga, a nice little village in Greece, last summer and fell in love with greece. Friendly people, very good and cheap food, especially the sea food.

So, it was easy to decide on Greece for the country this year too. Then to pick the destination. After looking around in various (finnish) travel agencies we found Limnos (or Lemnos) (Λήμνος). Aurinkomatkat had a cheap 2 week package, but when we finally had decided, it had gone. But who cares about packages... so we just booked the flights EFHK-LGAV-LGLM-LGAV-EFHK from blue1 and now we are looking for somekind of hotel.

Anyway, I beeing an openstreetmapper (and semi-active geocacher) checked out the map of Limnos.. google maps sucks, bing sucks and openstreetmap sucked, but not anymore ! Thanks to the Bing satellite images available I've been tracing roads couple of hours per day now for almost month and it's starting to look like something now.

My target is to have every single road that I can see from the satellite images drawn before going, so I have about 3.5 months time to do it :)

Unfortunately there are only on geocache on the whole island.

Creating a large map from OpenStreetMap map tiles

We where planning at work to print large maps of the BSR on plywood and create a puzzle out of it, I think it was 1x1 meter. I made the following simple bash script to download and stitch the tiles using ImageMagick:

#!/bin/sh
#From
#http://c.tile.cloudmade.com/fd093e52f0965d46bb1c6c6281022199/3/256/7/66/26.png
#To:
#http://b.tile.cloudmade.com/fd093e52f0965d46bb1c6c6281022199/3/256/7/76/42.png
Z=7
URL=http://tile.cloudmade.com/fd093e52f0965d46bb1c6c6281022199/3/256/

download_tile() {
 FILE=tile_${x}_${y}.png
 if [ -r $FILE ]; then 
  echo .
 else
  curl --output tile_${x}_${y}.png ${URL}/${Z}/${1}/${2}.png
 fi
}

for ((x=66;x<77;x++)) do
  for ((y=26;y<43;y++)) do
   download_tile $x $y
   sleep 0.1
  done
  montage -geometry 256x256 -tile 1x17 tile_${x}* map_${x}.png
  sleep 1
done

Unfortunately printing and large sticker or directly on plywood was out of the budget so in the end it wasn't needed. The fallback was handpainting, not as accurate, but looks pretty good still.
Anyway, I post this tiny script in here in case someone else might need something like it as I didn't find anything suitable when I was searching for a quick and simple solution. The best would of course had been to create a custom map using mapnik and all that, but it would have take too much time (and I don't have any hardware to play with at work, only my laptop with a tiny disk)

Finding roads to map for OpenStreetMap

Even if there is still a lot of mapping to do here in Finland, we already have most of the major roads done. I at least are having a problem finding roads to map when I'm not driving just for mapping anymore.
For example, our family summer cottage is a 240km away from my home, and all the roads that it makes sense to drive trough have already been mapped. And it doesen't help that the fastest way is the E18, starting 100m from home and going almost straight to the summer cottage, with only about 7km of some smaller roads to drive so you tend to prefer that fastest route instead of smaller roads. Not that I personally don't like driving on them, it's the others in the car (read: girl friend :) that like to get there fast.
So I've been trying to find some way to get myself on smaller roads and I think I've found a nice way that also requires a GPS. And, you guessed it, it's geocaching! I try to look for caches in obscure places so that I need to drive on smaller roads. And the gf, not eager, but at least she likes geocaching and tags along.

OpenStreetMaping using satellite images

As I've written before, I help out with OSM, mainly around Turku, but thanks to Yahoo, OSM can now use high-res satellite maps for some cities. Unfortunately, only the Helsinki/Vantaa/Espoo region is available here in Finland, but I've been making some progress in drawing some of the missing main roads around Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa. I've also added some nice details like Helsinki-Vantaa and Helsinki-Malmi airports.

OpenStreetMapping Finland

I got myself a Nokia 770 last summer and been using the most excellent maemo-mapper to navigate around Finland. I'm mostly very happy with it but route planning and place search is something I would really like to have (and for free that is). The biggest problem is that there is no free map data available (for €€€ you can always get the digiroad data but that is not an option).

On my quest to find map data I found out about the OpenStreetMap project. And since couple of months been eagerly adding as much data as I can gather when I drive around. It's not loong ago when Turku was almost empty, but now it's starting to look like a map. I think I'm mostly alone in Turku, but someone is working around Tampere and Helsinki. But we would really need more people involved.
There is still a lot of work to do but